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Sunday, January 22, 2017

This is so cool. Jerry W0PWE has built a magnificent BITX. With a digital VFO and Termination Insensitive Amplifiers, I think it qualifies as BITX DIGI-TIA #2. Running it "al fresco" he was tuning around on 40 and he heard DIGI-TIA #1 (mine!). As soon as he finished soldering in the power amplifier, he put it on the air and, in his second contact, worked Keith N6ORS -- Keith was running his MIN-X rig. Clearly TRGHS. Great work Jerry!

Hello Bill,

Jerry here W0PWE in Iowa. I save up your podcasts and listen
to them when I travel. A year or two
ago you and Pete got me interested in the BitX and I finally took action. I
have plenty of other
projects I should finish but boy was it ever fun to start a new one. This
morning I soldered the
last part in my newly hatched Bitx, drug it over to the operating position and
had two great QSOs
with it. See attached photo shows the rig as it was during those QSOs.

When I finished my first QSO with W9SX, Keith in WI N6ORS called me. He
was running a multi-band
Bitx he had built and we had a great HB2HB qso. Awesome!

My rig is scratch built, mostly SMT and generally follows the 40M schematic
that Farhan has on
his HFsignals page. I am using the Kopski/Hayward TIAs though and I designed a
6 pole crystal
filter for it since 6 of the 10 crystals I bought were very similar when I
characterized them
with my PHSNA setup. It uses the Adafruit SI5351 board and I modified a sketch
that LA3PNA wrote
for the Arduino.

I designed and fabricated the boards for it using the software and process
described by K7QO and
W5DOR. Toner transfer with the Hammerhill Gloss paper is working great. The
heatsink on my IRF510
is a little light. I could smell the MOSFET warming up during a few of my
lengthy transmissions
with Keith.

Now the SWL report. While listening on the receiver portion of my Bitx last
week I heard you on
7260 at about 0030Z. I think that was Tuesday or Wednesday. I wished I could
give you a call but
at that point my PA was merely a few traces on the computer screen. Hope to
hear you again on
40M.

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